Jake Xerxes Fussell – When I’m Called

An elegy, a cowboy dream, and a field recording in disguise.

Release Date: July 12, 2024
Label: Fat Possum Records
Listen / Order: Official album link

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Jake Xerxes Fussell doesn’t reinvent folk music—he reanimates it. On When I’m Called, his fifth studio album, he filters centuries of song through a Southern hush so gentle you might miss its strangeness. With songs like the sparse spiritual title track and the surreal Western ballad “Andy,” Fussell invites us not to consume tradition, but to dwell in it. The result is an album that’s both timeless and quietly radical.

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🎧 Album Overview

Folk music, in the hands of most revivalists, becomes either a pastiche or a protest. In the hands of Jake Xerxes Fussell, it becomes something more patient—more haunted. On When I’m Called, Fussell continues his singular mission: to gather the half-buried, half-remembered fragments of American song and make them breathe again.

But this isn’t nostalgia. It’s closer to archaeology. And yet—somehow—it swings.

Fussell’s songs arrive with little fanfare. No ornate arrangements, no genre mashups, no indie sheen. Just a gently fingerpicked guitar, an organ wheeze, a slow snare, and that unmistakable voice: low, soft, Southern, and steady. It’s a voice that sounds like it’s been through a dust storm and a dream.

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Track Focus: “When I’m Called”

“I will answer when I’m called / I will not laugh when the teacher calls my name…”

The title track, “When I’m Called,” feels like a schoolroom prayer left behind in a hymnbook. It’s childlike in structure, but there’s something chilling about it. The repetition builds tension, not comfort. Who’s calling? Who’s watching? The song doesn’t say—but it stays with you like a whisper from behind the veil.

This is classic Fussell: taking a fragment that might’ve been sung on a playground or in a forgotten chapel and holding it up to the light until you start to see shadows. It’s spiritual, but not pious. Reverent, but not polite.

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Track Focus: “Andy”

“You can tell Andy Warhol the ghost rider’s on his way…”

And then there’s “Andy”—a song unlike anything else on the album. At first listen, it sounds like a cowboy tune. But listen closer, and you’re in the middle of a surreal showdown between a ghostly folk singer and the ghost of Andy Warhol. It’s both hilarious and profound, like Johnny Cash narrating a Dadaist Western.

There’s vengeance in the lyrics:

“I’m coming for you Andy, and I’m gonna take away your star…”

It’s not clear if Fussell is taking aim at Warhol the person or what he represents—fame, branding, artificiality. But it doesn’t matter. The symbolic power is enough. Warhol becomes an outlaw sheriff, and Fussell, the folk historian, arrives to restore the dusty order of another kind of truth.

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From the Critics

Treble’s review captures Fussell’s place in the folk lineage perfectly:

“Fussell’s music is not merely steeped in tradition but constructed with its very raw materials… His exploration of music for music’s sake is enticing in its own right.”
— Treble review

Indeed, Fussell doesn’t just cover folk songs—he channels them. As the son of a folklorist and a lifelong interpreter of traditional material, his songs often come directly from archival sources like the Roud Folk Song Index or field recordings by Art Rosenbaum. But they never feel academic. They feel lived in.

And that’s the magic trick.

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Closing Thoughts

Jake Xerxes Fussell continues to make music that defies easy description. Is it folk? Field recording? Dream-state cowboy poetry? Yes. And no. It is music for people who want to remember something they’ve never heard before.

He might never write a confessional album or a chart hit. But When I’m Called isn’t about Jake. It’s about the songs that shaped him, and the quiet joy of passing them on.

Official album link

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Listen + Follow

• 🔊 Album: When I’m Called
• 📷 Instagram | 🌐 Website
• 🎧 Recommended if you like: Michael Hurley, Joan Shelley, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Lomax recordings, ghost stories